The Tempest by A.J. Scudiere (story read aloud .txt) 📗

steak. But almost as quickly as he enjoyed the thought, it soured.

It felt bad to be thinking about the physical pleasures of enjoying food and sating his hunger when he still hadn't found his sister. He pedaled harder.

The road wound in between and around farms and their outbuildings. Though the structures weren’t falling down, most of them looked relatively abandoned. Only one had lights on inside and a man outside picking up debris and tossing it into a pile in the corner of his yard.

He waved as the two went by. But they quickly pulled to stop.

Given the size of the lot, it took a while, but the man graciously crossed the long distance to the roadside, where they showed him the picture of Izzy and Joule and Sarah.

“Have you seen either of these two women?” Cage pointed to his sister. “We think she came through here not long ago.”

Though he was polite about it, the man dismissed them with a shake of his head. “We grabbed the kids and the dogs as soon as we heard the funnels were forming, and we got the hell out of Dodge. We only just came back maybe an hour ago.”

Having told them all he could, or all he was willing to, he turned and headed back toward the house, picking up debris as he went.

Cage and Dev shrugged at each other and hopped back on their bikes. At least the man hadn't been here the whole time. Had he been watching the road and known that Joule hadn't passed by, that would have been a blow to Cage’s hope.

He told himself there was still a very good chance that she was simply up the road a bit.

Another ping came in, and they stopped yet again to put their heads together and read it. Sarah had sent them a list of about fifteen names still missing from Helio Systems Tech. The last two were Isabel McAlister and Joule Mazur.

Cage didn't quite recognize a few of the others. Dev had to explain, “You know, the older guy? He has black hair with silver in it.” But Cage definitely recognized Saskia Kaczmarek, and he knew all the rest at least tangentially.

Dev looked at him with a bone-weary sigh. “Looks like we're on the lookout for more than just Joule and Izzy.”

Cage nodded. As if the task of finding the two women wasn’t monumental enough, there was this.

As they climbed back onto the bikes, Cage wondered if the phone would interfere the whole way, creating this start-and-stop situation. He pushed on the pedals and pressed farther down the dark road, making their way past farmhouses, barns, paddocks, and open fields.

Another thought rolled through his mind, one he hadn’t shared with Dev. They were supposed to be looking for Joule and Izzy. He’d hoped they were together. But from the first arrow they’d found, he’d known Joule was on her own.

He hadn’t backtracked down the path to see if he could find the point where she’d landed—to see if maybe she’d had to walk away from the body of one of her good friends. But the arrow had only been signed JM. Not JM / IM. Not J & I.

So the list of lost names was only a bit worse than what he’d already figured out. They wouldn’t be done when they found Joule. Izzy was somewhere else. And then so was everyone else on the list.

They stuck to the road, and he thought about staying to one side in case a car came through, but none did. With the farms so far apart, registering the distance they covered was difficult, but being on the road definitely made them much faster.

Then he began to wonder if he'd passed his sister somewhere along the way.

61

The air was knocked out of her as Joule was hit from the side.

Jerry had tackled them, ending the small standoff as she and Paul toppled together in a tangle of limbs and grunts. The shotgun fell to the floor. It hit too softly, landing on the hay-lined floor and not making a thump or clatter to adequately convey her anger at the whole situation.

In their stalls, the horses whuffed and stomped, clearly uneasy with what was going on.

Disoriented from the fall, Joule quickly scrambled up. Though everybody tried to do the same, she managed to get her feet under her and get upright a little faster than the old man and Jerry.

While she scrambled for the shotgun a little quicker than the others, she only managed to get her hand around the barrel as she saw another set of slim fingers grab for the stock.

This was not good. If they both picked up the weapon together, that would leave the barrel aimed at her. Also, having her hand on the barrel of a gun would be doubly bad news if someone pulled the trigger. But again she thought, Surprise your opponent.

So instead of yanking at the gun, she shoved it. And, as the woman stumbled backward in surprise, Joule yanked. Hard.

She won. Now in possession of the only weapon, she stepped back and aimed it toward the small crowd. She motioned the daughter to move carefully and slowly over next to her father, but simply ignored Jerry. God help him if he got in her way, though.

Thanks, Dad. She sent the thought out into whatever might be waiting in the beyond. She was grateful that her father had taught her how to shoot and hoped that skill might prevent her from being reunited with her parents too soon.

She remembered the feel of a gun. The weight of it, pushing it up against her shoulder and aiming the barrel toward the two she was trying to corral.

When the Night Hunters had come, her mother and father had argued about whether or not the children should be taught to handle guns. It had finally been decided that, for their own safety, they needed to be prepared to defend themselves. Aiming it at a